|
Costa Rica: Service Learning within Engineering Education at UGA is Redefining Study Abroad.
By Alan Flurry
On a dusty morning in Pocora, a village of 5,000 in the eastern-central Costa Rican province of Límon, UGA engineering undergraduates Delia Sanchez, Kyle Webb, Mandy Redden and Andé Burke tried to elaborate on questions asked of a man standing before a small, dilapidated house. The man, who lived with his wife and children in the two room structure, expressed curiosity about the presence of the foreigners. Lacking a common language, they struggled to understand each other, but in the interstices of silence the wheels of communication began to turn. A connection was made, not through words, but eyes – faces – and the interactions based on questions from a survey suddenly took on new meaning.
•
The Central American nation of Costa Rica is a kind of rural paradise, famed for its rainforests and dramatic coastlines. Its coffee is the envy of the hemisphere and with an extensive network of national parks, the country staked a legitimate claim as one of the early innovators in the evolving global phenomenon known as ecotourism. Indeed, the University of Georgia already has a significant presence there in this regard, with its Ecolodge and Research Station in the hamlet of San Luis.
But there is another Costa Rica not represented by these descriptors. It is the Costa Rica of the $4100 annual per capita income, where citizens work difficult jobs in non-unionized industries, living in small villages and eking out meager livelihoods with hints of destitution among all the natural beauty. It is this Costa Rica these UGA engineering students came to experience, be a part of and learn from.
The students had spent the first half of the semester in small groups as a part of their ENGR 4920 senior design project, specifically formulating the questions to be included in the survey. Equipped with a fluent Spanish speaker and an array of budding engineering fundamentals, the four students who drew this project had spent a great deal of time – via their own research as well as consultations with students and faculty at E.A.R.T.H University in Costa Rica – developing the survey, and they welcomed the opportunity to finally spend time with villagers. Their questionnaire reflected community-health concerns as much as technical issues of life in the village, though it was focused primarily on gathering information about the villagers’ drinking and waste water systems. The students embarked on the project with preconceived ideas about the problems in the village – and their own ability to offer solutions.
The UGA engineering senior design program, lead by a trio of faculty including David Gattie, who accompanied this group on spring break in Costa Rica, is a study in continuity which is itself designed for long-term impact. Projects range from designing adaptive wheelchairs for the disabled to devices for obtaining potable water under emergency conditions to the project in Pocora Sur. “We try to give the students a complex problem that necessitates working together and using what they’ve learned over the course of the undergraduate experience,” Gattie says.
The Costa Rica project hinges on synthesizing disparate information plus engaging a further trait that Gattie sees as crucial to the future of engineering education: the ability to step back and evaluate the questions. During the course of their visit the students would visit clinics, talking to patients about prescription medicines and waste water alike, even trek into the jungle in search of a mysterious water source.
The students uncovered no major threats to the drinking water of Pocora Sur; as for waste water, the answers were a bit more complicated. The lack of a centralized system resulted in little being known about the management of waste water in the village, which presumably operates on individual septic tanks. As the group surveyed more of the village, it was apparent that information was less available and loosely connected throughout the broader community. As they confronted this seeming conundrum, they began to understand that the specific subject of waste water was actually a problem related to many wider community issues. Information, education and self-governance came to the fore of what they first intuited as a narrow, technical problem. The kind of education necessary for the villagers to be informed – where their waste water goes when septic tanks are pumped – is also tied closely to economics and sustainability. By stepping back, the students recognized the disconnect among the larger issues of technology, governance, economics and education in the rural village.
The project exemplifies a new direction for service learning within engineering education, a program at UGA designed to inculcate engineering students with some of the multi-level expertise, communications skills and flexibility they will need to be successful engineers. While this may seem like a Herculean task with abstract payoffs in the near term, entering a small village as strangers the students quickly gain a deeper appreciation for the context of problem solving. Their preparations and the trip resulted in a true student learning project, whereby they begin to define what they can do and what a population actually needs. By this process, according to Gattie, service learning begins to take on a new meaning as well.
“Those students are now thinking differently, they’re more driven to asking questions first than just immediately seeking answers,” he says, relating the pivot to the profession in general. “Learning how to ask the right questions is what engineers need to do.”
And bringing them to that point, whether in a Costa Rican village or a lecture hall, is what UGA engineering is doing for its students. The senior design projects continue, connected from one year to the next. The students’ data from the Costa Rica trip, sponsored by a U.S.D.A International Science and Education (ISE) grant in the College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences, went into making a master plan to be followed by next year’s group. “They’ve developed a plan which will be the seminal contribution to a sustained relationship with that community and with E.A.R.T.H. University, one that UGA can build off of in the future,” says Gattie. §
|
